Indian Territory as a separate military entity came altogether too late into the reckonings of the North and the South.  It was now a devastated land, in large areas, desolate.  General Curtis and many another like him might well express regret that the red man had to be offered up in the white man’s slaughter.[717] It was unavailing regret and would ever be.  Just as with the aborigines who lay athwart the path of empire and had to yield or be crushed so with the civilized Indian of 1860.  The contending forces of a fratricidal war had little mercy for each other and none at all for him.  Words of sympathy were empty indeed.  His fate was inevitable.  He was between the upper and the nether mill-stones and, for him, there was no escape.

Indian Territory was really in a terrible condition.  Late in 1862, it had been advertised even by southern men as lost to the Confederate cause and had been

[Footnote 714:  It is not very clear whether or not the constituents of the Indian Brigade were all at once decided upon.  They are listed as they appear in Britton, Civil War on the Border, vol. ii, 3.  Schofield seems to have hesitated in the matter [Official Records, vol. xxii, part ii, 26].]

[Footnote 715:—­Ibid., 33.]

[Footnote 716:  On the subject of the reduction of Schofield’s command, see Ibid., 40.]

[Footnote 717:  Curtis to Phillips, February 17, 1863, Ibid., 113-114.]

practically abandoned to the jayhawker.  Scouting parties of both armies, as well as guerrillas, had preyed upon it like vultures.  Indians, outside of the ranks, were tragic figures in their utter helplessness.  They dared trust nobody.  It was time the Home Guard was being made to justify its name.  Indeed, as Ellithorpe reported, “to divert them to any other operations” than those within their own gates “will tend to demoralize them to dissolution."[718]

The winter of 1862-1863 was a severe one.  Its coming had been long deferred; but, by the middle of January, the cold weather had set in in real earnest.  Sleet and snow and a constantly descending thermometer made campaigning quite out of the question.  Colonel Phillips, no more than did his adversary, General Steele, gave any thought to an immediate offensive.  Like Steele his one idea was to replenish resources and to secure an outfit for his men.  They had been provided with the half worn-out baggage train of Blunt’s old division.  It was their all and would be so until their commander could supplement it by contrivances and careful management.  Incidentally, Phillips expected to hold the line of the Arkansas River; but not to attempt to cross it until spring should come.  It behooved him to look out for Marmaduke whose expeditions into Missouri[719] were cause for anxiety, especially as their range might at any moment be extended.

The Indian regiments of Phillips’s brigade were soon reported[720] upon by him and declared to be in a sad state.  The first regiment was still, to all intents and purposes, a Creek force, notwithstanding that its fortunes had been varied, its desertions, incomparable.